One odd thing about life is that it can be proceeding as normal, when suddenly an off-hand remark turns the mundane into something stressful, and something forgetful into something that picks away at your mind until you can think of little else.
Take, for example, the simple declarative, “I don’t iron,” issued by one of my offspring, not to me, but to someone else. Not iron? Was she talking about branding cows? In that case, neither do I. But if she was talking about ironing clothes, the concept was unfathomable. How can one not iron?
The secret, she continued, is to be there when the clothes dryer stops churning and immediately shake and smooth out the toasty warm clothing. I doubted it with the sincerity of someone who has long considered ironing as a necessary evil, as unavoidable as death and people who complain about taxes until they die. However, I considered the possibility that I might be wrong, and that if I were to be there the second the clothes dryer stopped turning, my ironing nightmares might be over.
To my mind, ironing has always been a manly duty, not something you would expect some accommodating woman to do for you. You gut your own game and you iron your own clothes. It’s as simple as that, and if you don’t like it you stop hunting and fishing and stop wearing clothing.
The trouble is, I hate ironing. I remember 30-plus years of irons in our house, each succeeding generation worse than the first. The first iron, made in America, lasted for many years. Since then, they’ve been a lot lighter and provided maybe a year of good ironing and then two more years of sputtering and leaking water all over the clothes before I would concede defeat and buy another one for $12 at Walmart.
Though skeptical, I tried the no-ironing method recommended by my offspring, guessing when the dryer was about to stop. This isn’t easy, because there isn’t a precise timer, there are simply choices: Energy preferred, moist, damp, light, medium, heavy, crispy, etc. So you look at the vertical red line and wait for it to advance to the “stop” location, which can take many, many minutes, which seem like many, many hours, sitting there in the laundry room waiting for clothes to dry. But I was determined, and finally the machine loudly clicked that it was finished.
I hurtled into action, yanking the door open before the last tumble was completed. Expectantly, I pulled out some flannel shirts and jeans, shaking them furiously and smoothing them by hand with the gentility of a psychopathic killer. But this did not solve the wrinkle problem. Wrinkles were dried into the clothing; the one shirt that didn’t look wrinkled upon closer inspection was one big wrinkle that broke into thousands of smaller ones when exposed to the cool air.
Back to the ironing board and endless minutes of smoothing out wrinkles with a hissing, spitting iron that I’m too cheap to replace at the moment. Then the doorbell rang, and the offspring in question walked in. I was happy to see that upon closer inspection, she looked a little wrinkled.